U.S. same store sales dropped 0.4 percent last quarter U.S. CEO Bill Simon said on the call. If the government hadn’t cut food stamp benefits in November, “we believe the quarter would have been flat,” he said.

Thursday’s earnings call is one of several times Walmart’s blamed government benefit cuts for mediocre revenue in recent months.

It’s no surprise that a reduction in benefits for the lowest-income Americans would hit Walmart’s bottom line. Eighteen percent of food stamp dollars are spent at Walmart stores, according to a Wall Street Journal report from October. The company also caters to the most cost-conscious consumers.

Though the retail giant is staying mum for now on a federal minimum wage hike, in 2005 Walmart executives acknowledged that raising the wage floor would boost the retailer.

“The U.S. minimum wage of $5.15 an hour has not been raised in nearly a decade, and we believe it is out of date with the times,” then CEO H. Lee Scott Jr. said in a 2005, according to the Washington Post. “Our customers simply don’t have the money to buy basic necessities between paychecks.”